Visit
an extraordinarily productive 15-million-year-old fossil locality
in, Nevada, a number of miles from Fallon--a place that has yielded
some 54 species of ancient plants from the middle Miocene Buffalo
Canyon Formation.

The Buffalo Canyon Formation lies
in the heart of the arid Great Basin physiographic province a
number of miles from Fallon, Nevada, home to the US Navy's Top
Gun fighter pilot program. This is a land characterized by three
widely distributed botanic species: sagebrush, juniper, and pinion
pine. But roughly 15.5 million years ago, during middle Miocene
geologic times, the present-day fossil locality was the site
of a large fresh-water lake around which flourished a great variety
of plants, including but of course not limited to--spruce, fir,
pine, ash, maple, zelkova, willow, and evergreen live oak.

Today, common to
abundant carbonized leaf and seed impressions from over 50 species
of trees and shrubs, along with commercially mineable quantities
of diatomite (a microscopic photosynthesizing single-celled plant),
can be found in the sedimentary layers deposited in that ancient
lake. Not only that, but several diatomite beds in the immediate
vicinity of the plant-bearing locality have been changed to prized
opal through the geologic forces of heat and pressure, a geologic
process that has created abundant, colorful material for hobby,
recreational lapidary use.

All of the fossil
plants occur in the diatomite member of the middle Miocene Buffalo
Canyon Formation, a regional badlands-forming deposit originally
named by geologist K. L. Barrows in 1971.

Credit for discovering
the fossil plant-bearing beds at Buffalo Canyon goes to a Mrs.
Beulah Buckner, who came across the productive diatomaceous beds
during a rockhounding excursion in either the 1940s or very early
1950s. After she eventually directed writer Harold O. Weight
and his wife Lucile to the locality, Mr. Weight wrote up an article
on the subject of fossil plants in Buffalo Canyon for a noted
national publication, in which he named one of the primary
fossil-bearing sites Fossil Leaf Hill.

Interestingly enough,
many years later, completely unaware of Mr. Weight's earlier
published documentation of the Buffalo Canyon fossils, I happened
to re-discover that same leaf and seed-bearing locality and decided
to call it Fossil Leaf Ridge. The thought of course occurred
to me at the time that probably loads of folks have independently
"discovered" that identical prolific plant-yielding
site over the decades.

The most efficient
way to locate fossil plants here is to split the soft shales
along their natural bedding planes. Use the pick end of a geology
rock hammer or a broad putty knife to split the poorly indurated,
often crumbly sedimentary material. If you should happen to accidentally
fracture a fossil specimen, use Duco Cement or some other fast-drying,
reliable glue to mend the break. But try to be especially careful
not to crack the fossils. Attempting to glue pieces of diatomaceous
shale back together is usually a messy, delicate chore. Several
coats of glue applied along the fractured surfaces may be required
to get the job done, since the porous, powdery rocks often soak
up glue like the proverbial sponge.

Not every sedimentary
rock layer in the area is fossiliferous--as a matter of fact
there appear to be many more barren horizons than plant-bearing
ones. But, generally speaking, if you can find the fine-grained,
whitish diatomaceous shales that outcrop in proximity to narrow
beds of blue-gray volcanic ash, your chances of finding superior
fossil plant specimens will increased dramatically. The "paper
shales" observed in parts of the section closely resemble
the plant and insect-bearing shales exposed in Fossil
Valley, Nevada, and Florissant, Colorado--noted
insect-yielding deposits of world-wide renown--although I've
yet to locate anything significant in the Buffalo Canyon sediments,
save for a few poorly preserved leaf fragments. Still, those
paper shales may well be worth some special explorations. Excellent
specimens could yet show up in them, due to the fact that they
lie in such close stratigraphic proximity to the plant-bearing
beds higher in the geologic section. Adding to the paper shales'
potential interest is the fact that, recently, a graduate student
on a field trip to Buffalo Canyon uncovered an exquisitely preserved
dragonfly wing--the very first fossil insect reported from the
middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation.

The shales in the
Buffalo Canyon Formation grade upward into geologically younger
tan to gray clays and sandstones bearing five distinct beds of
lignite, a brownish-black coal whose alteration of the original
vegetal constituents has proceeded farther than in peat but no
so far as in subbituminous coal. All five layers of the lignite
have been analyzed for possible uranium content, but only two
of the beds showed any potential economic interest, averaging
0.052 to 0.1 percent uranium. The ashy-gray mudstones in this
part of the geologic section frequently yield abundant remains
of reeds from a species of cattail, a scouring rush.

The Buffalo Canyon
fossil flora was most recently analyzed by the late paleobotanist
Daniel I. Axelrod in an informative monograph. Axelrod concluded
that the fossil floral association most closely resembles conifer-deciduous
forests now living in three widely separated areas of the United
States: the Klamath Mountains of northwestern California; the
Adirondack Mountains of eastern Americal; and the Porcupine Mountains
of Michigan.

Based on the environmental
preferences of modern analogs of the fossil flora, Axelrod decided
that precipitation in the ancestral Buffalo Canyon Basin was
approximately 35 to 40 inches per year, a figure that contrasts
radically with the scant 15 inches delivered there today--and
most of that amount is in the form of winter snow. A major difference
in the rainfall patterns 15.5 million years ago was that storms
dropped significant amounts of precipitation during both the
winter and summer months--enough rain during those seasons, as
a matter of fact, to account for such sensitive indicators as
elm, birch, hickory, black locust, and zelkova in the local fossil
record.

Temperatures were
also apparently much more moderate some 15.5 million years ago.
For example, terrain in proximity to today's fossiliferous Buffalo
Canyon Formation experiences an average June-July temperature
of some 77 degrees, but the associations of fossil plants now
found there prove that 15 million years ago the average monthly
reading for that specific time of season could not have been
any higher than 63 degrees. And while today's average January
temperatures range downward to a frigid, arctic-style 10 degrees,
the mid-Miocene plants demonstrate that 15.5 million years ago
a typical January mean would have been a rather chilly, but tolerable
37 degrees.

Such a major change
in Buffalo Canyon's precipitation and temperature averages over
geologic time suggests that elevations there differed significantly
some 16 to 15 million years ago. Cogitating this perplexing problem,
Axelrod studied in great detail the environmental requirements
for today's analogs of species found in the Buffalo Canyon Formation
to determine that the plants likely accumulated at an elevation
of roughly 4,200 feet; today, the fossil site lies at an altitude
of 6,060 feet, suggesting, according to Axelrod's analysis, that
the region has undergone an uplift of approximately 1,900 feet
since middle Miocene times 15.5 million years ago.

But, that was not
the end of the "uplift" story. Far from it. Eventually,
the late paleobotanists Howard E. Schorn and Jack A. Wolfe, along
with several other scientists working the problem independently,
applied sophisticated geophysical, geochemical, and Climate Leaf
Analysis Multivariate Program methodology (CLAMP) to conclude
that the present-day Great Basin region of eastern California
(Death Valley region), Nevada, southeastern Oregon, southern
Idaho, and extreme western Utah stood just as high, if not higher,
during middle Miocene times than it does today. Accordingly,
when all the evidence from disparate avenues of analysis finally
came together, Schorn and Wolfe proposed that the Buffalo Canyon
Formation plants accumulated at an elevation of roughly 9,000
feet, that in actual fact the entire Cenozoic Era Great Basin
region--the so-called Nevadaplano--had remained a vast high plateau
region for most of the early to mid Teriary Period (Paleocene,
Eocene, Oligocene, and lower to middle Miocene Epochs), until
at last that Nevadaplano gradually dropped, collapsed, to its
modern-day elevations by 13 million years ago through geologic
extensional stress and concomitant block faulting which helped
create the modern Great Basin geography.

Today, roughly
15 million years after Buffalo Canyon Lake ceased to exist, dried
up--a moment in geologic time before the Nevadaplano high plateau
completely collapsed--some 54 species of fossil plants remain
in the rocks to tell their fascinating paleobotanical tales.
The two most conspicuous, and abundant, forms encountered in
the Buffalo Canyon Formation are intact leaves from an evergreen
live oak, Quercus pollardiana--a species that is practically
identical to the living maul oak now native to the western foothills
of the Sierra Nevada, Cascade Mountains and Coast Ranges of California--and
leaves from a birch, Betula thor, whose vegetation is
identical to the the modern paper birch. Other less commonly
observed specimens include the leafy twigs of cypress, a juniper,
in addition to the leaves of cattail, four species of cottonwood,
six species of willow, an alder, three additional species of
birch, a hornbeam, a hickory, a black walnut, two more species
of oak, an elm, a zelkova, two species of holly grape, a water
lily, a hydrangea, four species of currant, a Catalina ironwood,
three species of bitter cherry, a rose, a mountain ash, a leadplant,
a black locust, a tropical cypress, a madrone, a stopper, two
species of ash, a sparkleberry, and a snowberry. Also present,
but rarely recovered, are the winged flying seeds of two species
of fir, one species of larch, three species of spruce, two species
of pine, one species of Douglas-fir, one species of hemlock,
and five species of maple.

During my last
extended exploration of the Buffalo Canyon Formation, I spent
a couple of productive days opening a modest-sized fossil quarry.
The digging was good. Among my keepers were several nice birch
leaves, winged spruce seeds, a few relatively rare Zelkova leaves,
and many nice evergreen live oak leaves. A few years later I
made a brief stopover to check out my quarry, which had lain
dormant all that time. Unfortunately, I found it had been obliterated
by heavy rains. All that was left to mark the site of my past
digs were several large slabs of shale I remember having yanked
out while attempting to expose a particularly fossiliferous layer
upon which were plastered some fine specimens of oak leaves.
The slabs of shale had been washed way down slope into a newly
formed natural gully far removed where I had dug--the result
of intense, short-lived rampaging runoff that had taken advantage
of the softer sedimentary rocks there, cutting into them with
potent ease: acts of inexorable erosive power on full display
here. I spent a couple of hours digging in the same general area
as my original quarry and was pleased to learn that the fossil
plants were still "alive and well;" they could still
be found there, much to my delight.

All of the collecting
sites are presently accessible: as far as I am aware, no federal
or private ownership collecting restrictions exist. Still and
all, conscientious fossil aficionados will nevertheless opt to
conduct common sense due diligence to determine the current legal
accessibility of the fossil locality before visiting. And, of
course, should commercial collecting parties begin to raid and
desecrate the fossil plant localities, the Bureau of Land Management
will most certainly close the fossil leaf-bearing district to
all but professional paleontologists.

It should be pointed
out, perhaps, that eventually, after several years of conducting
occasional visits to the much-productive district, I decided
to donate practically all the fossil plants I'd recovered from
the middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation to a major museum's
archival paleobotanical fossil repository. As a general rule,
all particularly well-preserved plant remains collected from
the area should be brought the attention of a professional paleobotanist;
who knows, perhaps you have uncovered a species that is new to
science!

A field trip to Buffalo Canyon, Nevada,
will provide visitors with something out of the ordinary: a chance
to collect a large selection of nicely preserved middle Miocene
plant remains, plus an abundance of very colorful specimens of
common opal, as well. As you dig into the fossiliferous diatomaceous
shales of the middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation, you will
bring fossil leaves and winged seeds to their first light of
day in some 15 million years, species which tell of a time when
the plant life in this part of arid Nevada resembled the modern-day
rain-rich Klamath Mountains of northwestern California and the
humid, moist forests of the Adirondack and Porcupine Mountains
of the northeastern United States.

Click On The Images For Larger
Views

On-Site
Images

Click
on the image for a larger picture. The view is southeast to the
southern end of a plant-bearing outcrop of the Middle Miocene
Buffalo Canyon Formation--the whitish slope at upper left quadrant
of the image.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. Looking essentially due east
to the west-facing slope of one of the primary fossil plant-bearing
sites in the plant-bearing district. Relatively common, excellently
preserved fossil leaf and winged seed impressions occur from
about one-half to three-quarters the way up the moderate slope.
Note the relatively flat-lying diatomaceous shales and mudstones
of the Middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation, which yields
some 54 species of plants.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. The view is roughly south
along the west-facing slope of a fossil plant-bearing section.
The 15-million-year-old leaf and winged seed impressions occur
in the diatomite member--composed almost entirely of the microscopic
single-celled aquatic plant called diatoms) of the Middle Miocene
Buffalo Canyon Formation: leaves of evergreen live oak and the
paper birch are the most commonly encountered remains.

Click On The Images For Larger
Views

Fossil
Plants Images

Click
on the image for a larger picture. A complete leaf from the evergreen
live oak, Quercus pollardiana, which is similar to the
living maul oak, now native to the western foothills of the Sierra
Nevada, Cascade Mountains and Coast Ranges of California; this
species is a co-dominant of the flora.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. A mostly complete leaf (stem
is missing) from the evergreen live oak Quercus pollardiana,
a Miocene analog of the living maul oak, native to the Sierra
Nevada and other mountain ranges of California.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. Here is a complete specimen
of a zelkovaleaf, a member of the elm family, Zelkova brownii.
Out of some 8,276 fossil plant specimens that paleobotanist
Daniel I. Axelrod collected from the Buffalo Canyon Formation,
he found only 744 zelkova leaves.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. A winged seed from a spruce, Picea
sp. Not sure which species it came from---it appears to most
closely resemble a variety Axelrod called Picea lahotense,
a spruce whose closest modern analogs are now native to eastern
Asia.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. A common cattail leaf from
the Middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation, Churchill County,
Nevada, Typha lesquereuxi.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. Here is a mostly complete
leaf (the tip is missing) from an alder, Alnus latahensis,
which is the fossil equivalent of the modern Seaside alder
now native to Maryland and Delaware in the United States of America.

Click
on the image for a larger image. A twig from a species of juniper
called Juniperus desotoyana, which is closely allied with
the living Eastern Red Cedar, or the Pencil Cedar, native to North
America, from Hudson Bay, all the way south to Florida. and Texas.
Of course, it is not a true cedar at all--it is a variety of
juniper.

A
Water lily seed pod called scientifically Nymphaeites nevadensis.
Image courtesy of Howard Schorn, retired Collections Manager
of fossil plants at the University California Museum of Paleontology.

Click
on the image for a larger picture. Specimens of high grade, commercially
minable diatomite from the Middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation,
Buffalo Canyon. Diatomite is composed almost entirely of microscopic
single-celled aquatic plants called diatoms.

Click On The Image For Larger
View

Common
Opal Image

Click
on the image for a larger picture. Pieces of common opal from
contact-altered beds of diatomite in Buffalo Canyon; specimens
are likely too fractured for serious lapidary use, but there's
a lot of the colorful material available for recreational rockhounding
purposes.

For an all-text page that includes all of my guitar mp3
files placed on the Internet, go to All
Inyo All The Time. That's where you'll find access to all
of my musical selections, in order of their appearance on the
Web--from my first Cyber-CD ("The Acoustic Guitar Solitaire
Of Inyo") to the last, "The Rarities And Alternate
Recordings Of Inyo."

Jump on over to my page It's
A Happening Thing--Music From The Year 1967. Includes YouTube
(and other sources) links to all songs that charted US Billboard
Top 100 in year 1967 (close to a thousand, as as matter of fact),
plus links to records that bubbled under US Billboard's Hot 100
charts that year (releases that placed #101 to #135); peruse,
too, my extensive personal database of year 1967 music.

Paleontology-Related
Pages

Web sites I
have created pertaining to fossils

Fossils
In Death Valley National Park: A site dedicated to
the paleontology, geology, and natural wonders of Death Valley
National Park; lots of on-site photographs of scenic localities
within the park; images of fossils specimens; links to many virtual
field trips of fossil-bearing interest.

Fossil
Insects And Vertebrates On The Mojave Desert, California:
Journey to two world-famous fossil sites in the middle Miocene
Barstow Formation: one locality yields upwards of 50 species
of fully three-dimensional, silicified freshwater insects, arachnids,
and crustaceans that can be dissolved free and intact from calcareous
concretions; a second Barstow Formation district provides vertebrate
paleontologists with one of the greatest concentrations of Miocene
mammal fossils yet recovered from North America--it's the type
locality for the Bartovian State of the Miocene Epoch, 15.9 to
12.5 million years ago, with which all geologically time-equivalent
rocks in North American are compared.

Fossils
At Red Rock Canyon State Park, California: Visit wildly
colorful Red Rock Canyon State Park on California's northern
Mojave Desert, approximately 130 miles north of Los Angeles--scene
of innumerable Hollywood film productions and commercials over
the years--where the Middle to Late Miocene (13 to 7 million
years old) Dove Spring Formation, along with a classic deposit
of petrified woods, yields one of the great terrestrial, land-deposited
Miocene vertebrate fossil faunas in all the western United States.

Late
Pennsylvanian Fossils In Kansas: Travel to the midwestern
plains to discover the classic late Pennsylvanian fossil wealth
of Kansas--abundant, supremely well-preserved associations of
such invertebrate animals as brachiopods, bryozoans, corals,
echinoderms, fusulinids, mollusks (gastropods, pelecypods, cephalopods,
scaphopods), and sponges; one of the great places on the planet
to find fossils some 307 to 299 million years old.

Fossil
Plants Of The Ione Basin, California: Head to Amador
County in the western foothills of California's Sierra Nevada
to explore the fossil leaf-bearing Middle Eocene Ione Formation
of the Ione Basin. This is a completely undescribed fossil flora
from a geologically fascinating district that produces not only
paleobotanically invaluable suites of fossil leaves, but also
world-renowned commercial deposits of silica sand, high-grade
kaolinite clay and the extraordinarily rare Montan Wax-rich lignites
(a type of low grade coal).

Trilobites
In The Marble Mountains, Mojave Desert, California:
Take a trip to the place that first inspired my life-long fascination
and interest in fossils--the classic trilobite quarry in the
Lower Cambrian Latham Shale, in the Marble Mountains of California's
Mojave Desert. It's a special place, now included in the rather
recently established Trilobite Wilderness, where some 21 species
of ancient plants and animals have been found--including trilobites,
an echinoderm, a coelenterate, mollusks, blue-green algae and
brachiopods.

Early
Cambrian Fossils Of Westgard Pass, California: Visit
the Westgard Pass area, a world-renowned geologic wonderland
several miles east of Big Pine, California, in the neighboring
White-Inyo Mountains, to examine one of the best places in the
world to find archaeocyathids--an enigmatic invertebrate animal
that went extinct some 510 million years ago, never surviving
past the early Cambrian; also present there in rocks over a half
billion years old are locally common trilobites, plus annelid
and arthropod trails, and early echinoderms.

A
Visit To Ammonite Canyon, Nevada: Explore one of the
best-exposed, most complete fossiliferous marine late Triassic
through early Jurassic geologic sections in the world--a place
where the important end-time Triassic mass extinction has been
preserved in the paleontological record. Lots of key species
of ammonites, brachiopods, corals, gastropods and pelecypods.

Fossils
In Millard County, Utah: Take virtual field trips
to two world-famous fossil localities in Millard County, Utah--Wheeler
Amphitheater in the trilobite-bearing middle Cambrian Wheeler
Shale; and Fossil Mountain in the brachiopod-ostracod-gastropod-echinoderm-trilobite
rich lower Ordovician Pogonip Group.

Paleozoic
Era Fossils At Mazourka Canyon, Inyo County, California:
Visit a productive Paleozoic Era fossil-bearing area near Independence,
California--along the east side of California's Owens Valley,
with the great Sierra Nevada as a dramatic backdrop--a paleontologically
fascinating place that yields a great assortment of invertebrate
animals.

Late
Triassic Ichthyosaur And Invertebrate Fossils In Nevada:
Journey to two classic, world-famous fossil localities in the
Upper Triassic Luning Formation of Nevada--Berlin-Ichthyosaur
State Park and Coral Reef Canyon. At Berlin-Ichthyosaur, observe
in-situ the remains of several gigantic ichthyosaur skeletons
preserved in a fossil quarry; then head out into the hills, outside
the state park, to find plentiful pelecypods, gastropods, brachiopods
and ammonoids. At Coral Reef Canyon, find an amazing abundance
of corals, sponges, brachiopods, echinoids (sea urchins), pelecypods,
gastropods, belemnites and ammonoids.

Fossils
From The Kettleman Hills, California: Visit one of
California's premiere Pliocene-age (approximately 4.5 to 2.0
million years old) fossil localities--the Kettleman Hills, which
lie along the western edge of California's Great Central Valley
northwest of Bakersfield. This is where innumerable sand dollars,
pectens, oysters, gastropods, "bulbous fish growths"
and pelecypods occur in the Etchegoin, San Joaquin and Tulare
Formations.

Field
Trip To The Kettleman Hills Fossil District, California:
Take a virtual field trip to a classic
site on the western side of California's Great Central Valley,
roughly 80 miles northwest of Bakersfield, where several Pliocene-age
(roughly 4.5 to 2 million years old) geologic rock formations
yield a wealth of diverse, abundant fossil material--sand dollars,
scallop shells, oysters, gastropods and "bulbous fish growths"
(fossil bony tumors--found nowhere else, save the Kettleman Hills),
among many other paleontological remains.

A
Visit To The Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed, Southern California:
Travel to the dusty hills near Bakersfield, California, along
the eastern side of the Great Central Valley in the western foothills
of the Sierra Nevada, to explore the world-famous Sharktooth
Hill Bone Bed, a Middle Miocene marine deposit some 16 to 15
million years old that yields over a hundred species of sharks,
rays, bony fishes, and sea mammals from a geologic rock formation
called the Round Mountain Silt Member of the Temblor Formation;
this is the most prolific marine, vertebrate fossil-bearing Middle
Miocene deposit in the world.

In
Search Of Fossils In The Tin Mountain Limestone, California:
Journey to the Death Valley area of Inyo County, California,
to explore the highly fossiliferous Lower Mississippian Tin Mountain
Limestone; visit three localities that provide easy access to
a roughly 358 million year-old calcium carbate accumulation that
contains well preserved corals, brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids,
and ostracods--among other major groups of invertebrate animals.

Middle
Triassic Ammonoids From Nevada: Travel to a world-famous
fossil locality in the Great Basin Desert of Nevada, a specific
place that yields some 41 species of ammonoids, in addition to
five species of pelecypods and four varieties of belemnites from
the Middle Triassic Prida Formation, which is roughly 235 million
years old; many paleontologists consider this specific site the
single best Middle Triassic, late Anisian Stage ammonoid locality
in the world. All told, the Prida Formation yields 68 species
of ammonoids spanning the entire Middle Triassic age, or roughly
241 to 227 million years ago.

Fossil
Bones In The Coso Range, Inyo County, California:
Visit the Coso Range Wilderness, west of
Death Valley National Park at the southern end of California's
Owens Valley, where vertebrate fossils some 4.8 to 3.0 million
years old can be observed in the Pliocene-age Coso Formation:
It's a paleontologically significant place that yields many species
of mammals, including the remains of Equus simplicidens, the
Hagerman Horse, named for its spectacular occurrences
at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument in Idaho; Equus
simplicidens is considered the earliest known member of the
genus Equus, whichincludes the modern horse and
all other equids.

Fossil
Plants At Aldrich Hill, Western Nevada:
Take a field trip to western Nevada, in the vicinity of Yerington,
to famous Aldrich Hill, where one can collect some 35 species
of ancient plants--leaves, seeds and twigs--from the Middle Miocene
Aldirch Station Formation, roughly 12 to 13 million years old.
Find the leaves of evergreen live oak, willow, and Catalina Ironwood
(which today is restricted in its natural habitat solely to the
Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California), among
others, plus the seeds of many kinds of conifers, including spruce;
expect to find the twigs of Giant Sequoias, too.

Fossils
From Pleistocene Lake Manix, California: Explore the
badlands of the Manix Lake Beds on California's Mojave Desert,
an Upper Pleistocene deposit that produces abundant fossil remains
from the silts and sands left behind by a great fresh water lake,
roughly 350,000 to 19,000 years old--the Manix Beds yield many
species of fresh water mollusks (gastropods and pelecypods),
skeletal elements from fish (the Tui Mojave Chub and Three-Spine
Stickleback), plus roughly 50 species of mammals and birds, many
of which can also be found in the incredible, world-famous La
Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles.

Field
Trip To Pleistocene Lake Manix, California: Go on
a virtual field trip to the classic, fossiliferous badlands carved
in the Upper Pleistocene Manix Formation, Mojave Desert, California.
It's a special place that yields beaucoup fossil remains, including
fresh water mollusks, fish (the Mojave Tui Chub), birds and mammals.

Ammonoids
At Union Wash, California: Explore
ammonoid-rich Union Wash near Lone Pine, California, in the shadows
of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United
States. Union Wash is a ne plus ultra place to find Early Triassic
ammonoids in California. The extinct cephalopods occur in abundance
in the Lower Triassic Union Wash Formation, with the dramatic
back-drop of the glacier-gouged Sierra Nevada skyline in view
to the immediate west.

Ordovician
Fossils At The Great Beatty Mudmound, Nevada: Visit a classic 475-million-year-old fossil
locality in the vicinity of Beatty, Nevada, only a few miles
east of Death Valley National Park; here, the fossils occur in
the Middle Ordovician Antelope Valley Limestone at a prominent
Mudmound/Biohern. Lots of fossils can be found there, including
silicified brachiopods, trilobites, nautiloids, echinoderms,
bryozoans, ostracodes and conodonts.

Paleobotanical
Field Trip To The Sailor Flat Hydraulic Gold Mine, California:
Journey on a day of paleobotanical discovery with the FarWest
Science Foundation to the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada--to
famous Sailor Flat, an abandoned hydraulic gold mine of the mid
to late 1800s, where members of the foundation collect fossil
leaves from the "chocolate" shales of the Middle Eocene
auriferous gravels; all significant specimens go to the archival
paleobotanical collections at the University California Museum
Of Paleontology in Berkeley.

Early
Cambrian Fossils In Western Nevada: Explore
a 518-million-year-old fossil locality several miles north of
Death Valley National Park, in Esmeralda County, Nevada, where
the Lower Cambrian Harkless Formation yields the largest single
assemblage of Early Cambrian trilobites yet described from a
specific fossil locality in North America; the locality also
yields archeocyathids (an extinct sponge), plus salterella (the
"ice-cream cone fossil"--an extinct conical animal
placed into its own unique phylum, called Agmata), brachiopods
and invertebrate tracks and trails.

Fossil
Leaves And Seeds In West-Central Nevada: Take
a field trip to the Middlegate Hills area in west-central Nevada.
It's a place where the Middle Miocene Middlegate Formation provides
paleobotany enthusiasts with some 64 species of fossil plant
remains, including the leaves of evergreen live oak, tanbark
oak, bigleaf maple, and paper birch--plus the twigs of giant
sequoias and the winged seeds from a spruce.

Fossil
Plants In The Dead Camel Range, Nevada: Visit
a remote site in the vicinity of Fallon, Nevada, where the Middle
Miocene Desert Peak Formation provides paleobotany enthusiasts
with 22 species of nicely preserved leaves from a variety
of deciduous trees and evergreen live oaks, in addition to samaras
(winged seeds), needles and twigs from several types of conifers.

Early
Triassic Ammonoid Fossils In Nevada: Visit the two
remote localities in Nevada that yield abundant, well-preserved
ammonoids in the Lower Triassic Thaynes Formation, some 240 million
years old--one of the sites just happens to be the single finest
Early Triassic ammonoid locality in North America.

Fossil
Plants At Buffalo Canyon, Nevada: Explore the wilds
of west-central Nevada, a number of miles from Fallon, where
the Middle Miocene Buffalo Canyon Formation yields to seekers
of paleontology some 54 species of deciduous and coniferous varieties
of 15-million-year-old leaves, seeds and twigs from such varieties
as spruce, fir, pine, ash, maple, zelkova, willow and evergreen
live oak

High
Inyo Mountains Fossils, California: Take a ride to
the crest of the High Inyo Mountains to find abundant ammonoids
and pelecypods--plus, some shark teeth and terrestrial plants
in the Upper Mississippian Chainman Shale, roughly 325 million
years old.

Field
Trip To The Copper Basin Fossil Flora, Nevada: Visit
a remote region in Nevada, where the Late Eocene Dead Horse Tuff
provides seekers of paleobotany with some 42 species of ancient
plants, roughly 39 to 40 million years old, including the leaves
of alder, tanbark oak, Oregon grape and sassafras.

Fossil
Plants And Insects At Bull Run, Nevada: Head
into the deep backcountry of Nevada to collect fossils from the
famous Late Eocene Chicken Creek Formation, which yields, in
addition to abundant fossil fly larvae, a paleobotanically wonderful
association ofwinged seeds
and fascicles (bundles of needles) from many species of conifers,
including fir, pine, spruce, larch, hemlock and cypress. The
plants are some 37 million old and represent an essentially pure
montane conifer forest, one of the very few such fossil occurrences
in the Tertiary Period of the United States.

A
Visit To The Early Cambrian Waucoba Spring Geologic Section,
California: Journey to the northwestern sector of
Death Valley National Park to explore the classic, world-famous
Waucoba Spring Early Cambrian geologic section, first described
by the pioneering paleontologist C.D. Walcott in the late 1800s;
surprisingly well preserved 540-510 million-year-old remains
of trilobites, invertebrate tracks and trails, Girvanella
algal oncolites and archeocyathids (an extinct variety of
sponge) can be observed in situ.

Fossil
Giant Sequoia Foliage From Nevada: Images of the youngest
fossil foliage from a giant sequoia ever discovered in the geologic
record--the specimen is Lower Pliocene in geologic age, around
5 million years old.

In
Search Of Vanished Ages--Field Trips To Fossil Localities In
California, Nevada, And Utah--My fossils-related field
trips in full print book form (pdf). 98,703 words (equivalent
to a medium-size hard cover work of non-fiction); 250 printed
pages (equivalent to about 380 pages in hard cover book form);
27 chapters; 30 individual field trips to places of paleontological
interest; 60 photographs--representative on-site images and pictures
of fossils from each locality visited.